Sheltering in Storm, Family Must Flee as Debris Rains From Brooklyn Bridge

With his family taking shelter from a powerful storm under the Brooklyn Bridge on Wednesday evening, Jerome Dilligard darted out into the streets of the Dumbo neighborhood to retrieve their car. When he returned a few moments later, all he could see where his family had stood was a mound of gray rubble.

Part of the facade of a wall near the bridge’s pedestrian entrance had crumbled to the ground, raining chunks of stone and dust on his wife, his 8-year-old daughter, his 30-year-old daughter and his two grandchildren. For a moment, he despaired of rescuing them from beneath the debris. Then he saw his wife, Teresa Dilligard, who, though stunned, managed to tell him that the rest of the family had narrowly escaped being engulfed and had fled across the street — though not before his 4-month-old granddaughter, Kiarra, had fallen out of her baby carriage.

“I’m right around the corner, I come right back, and within that time, all hell broke loose,” Mr. Dilligard, 52, a retired corrections officer who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said on Thursday. “It was a disaster.”

They had spent an idyllic afternoon visiting Brooklyn Bridge Park, taking the route through the underpass at Prospect Street and Washington Street as they had done dozens of times. Then heavy rain, thunder and lightning drove them under the bridge with another couple, who had managed to hail a cab to the subway by the time Mr. Dilligard decided to make a run for the car.

While he was gone, Ms. Dilligard said, water began seeping through the stones covering the wall. No sound warned them of what was to come. Then, a little after 7:30 p.m., the stones simply tumbled down, exposing bare concrete behind them.

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After the area was cleared and inspected.CreditAndrew Renneisen/The New York Times

Fire trucks and other emergency personnel quickly arrived at the area, closing the streets around the bridge. By Thursday morning, the streets had reopened, and pedestrians could come and go freely through the underpass, which connects Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Bridge Park to Dumbo and to the steps up to the bridge’s pedestrian walkway. Workers had stripped the rest of the facade off for safety.

A Fire Department spokeswoman said that five adults and three children, including Mr. Dilligard and his family, had been treated for minor injuries at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan. Mr. Dilligard’s family has been released, although he said Kiarra was still undergoing tests.

Nancy Greco-Silvestri, a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said there were no structural issues at the bridge.

A spokeswoman for the Transportation Department said in a statement that it was conducting “a full inspection of all the facade, and we will continue to thoroughly inspect our entire bridge inventory.”

The department last inspected all its bridges in 2012, and is in the midst of another citywide inspection.

A police officer, who declined to give her name because of the continuing investigation, said workers had been doing construction on the overpass of the bridge before the storm, which may have enabled water to seep down into the underpass when it began to rain. She cautioned that no link between the construction and the collapse had been confirmed.

Mr. Dilligard is thankful, he said, that none of his family was seriously hurt. But he said he hoped the city would investigate the incident thoroughly, because “that’s not normal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Sheltering in Storm, Family Must Flee as Debris Rains From Brooklyn Bridge. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe